Just to be 100 per cent clear: I’m going to get this wrong. The reason for this, I like to think, is because there is no right — top 10 lists are more things to argue about than listen to, really, so without further delay, let the browbeating begin. In no particular order, my best of the year:

Full disclosure: I had this one picked for the top 10 long before it opened its doors this summer, a fact I won’t apologize for: A full, in-depth retrospective of one of Canada’s — and certainly Toronto’s — most influential art teams of all time was both sorely needed and long overdue. When “Haute Culture” finally did open to the public, I was surprised that it could be even more engrossing than my very generous imagination had allowed. The General Idea fables of grandeur are one thing on paper — the only way a generation of us had been able to experience them, until now — and something else entirely in person. I have to give the AGO credit; for the broadest swath of potential audience, devoting two full floors to GI remains a risk. At the same time, this is the museum doing exactly what it should be doing: building a context for art-making and its history right here in its own hometown, and this is a huge, significant part of exactly that. Not to over state its importance, but I can’t help but think “Haute Culture” will change things around here. It is a fully fleshed-out, meticulously crafted alternate reality and a beacon of the possible for any artist working within viewing distance. But don’t take my word for it: you still have until Jan. 1 to see for yourself.

2. “Luis Jacob: Pictures at an Exhibition,” Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art

For all the drum-beating I do for our local museums to be more, well, local, this one’s a no-brainer. Jacob, a Toronto-devoted artist with an ever-expanding international career, had the homecoming show he deserved last winter, and he dispelled any fears of local-minded tokenism within steps of the front door. Huge paintings all but crackled on opposite walls of the museum, each of them depicting a dynamic, semi-abstract wraith, glowering intensely amid Jacob’s more subdued works. Some, like his most recent Album, were works much-coveted on an international museum scale that includes the Guggenheim; others were the very first things Jacob made as an undergraduate in philosophy and semiotics at the University of Toronto. All of it coalesced under the steady, searing gaze of those paintings; a probing, visceral reminder that Jacob’s project has always been about seeing first, feeling next and thinking after.

3. “Amy Swartz, Pest,” Angell Gallery

It was only open for a couple of weeks this summer and Swartz, in self-imposed limbo from the art world the last few years, is hardly a marquee name, but the buzz — if you’ll pardon the pun — was unstoppable. In a set of vitrines at the Angell Gallery, Swartz put on display her extraordinarily beautiful, creepy compulsion: thousands of insects that she had fused, Moreau-like, with tiny human miniatures to create sweeping epics of ornithological delirium. It was one of those things you don’t question why, how or who — you’re just happy it’s here and that you had the good luck to stop in for a look.

4. “Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Phantom Truck,” The Power Plant

With all the fuss about Thomas Hirschorn’s grisly spectacular, “Das Auge,” across the hall, it would have been easy to miss Manglano-Ovalle’s Phantom Truck this spring. Once you slipped through the black door tucked discretely in the corner of the gallery, though, you were lost: In the near-pitch black space, I guided myself along a wall with one hand, groping as though blind as an ominous, imposing silhouette of the title object, which filled almost the entire room, came into view. The accompanying program said that the piece was a full-scale recreation of a mobile biological weapons lab described by then-U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Council as partial justification for the invasion of Iraq, but the political freighting was an unnecessary and maybe even distracting feature for the experience itself. Manglano-Ovalle cast you alone into darkness, only to allow you to discover, once your eyes adjusted, something both captivating and, in its quietly sinister mysteriousness, far more unsettling.

5. “Jack Chambers: The Light From the Darkness, Silver Paintings and Film Work,” at the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art

Jack Chambers, a London, Ont., painter of very singular gifts, burned brightly during his lifetime but quickly faded from view following his death from Leukemia in 1978. The Art Gallery of Ontario opened its long-gestating survey of Chambers’ career this fall, but the Chambers recovery effort began in his hometown Museum London early this year with “The Light From the Darkness,” a sharply focused exhibition displaying a selection of his experimental films alongside his silver paintings, so-named because of the artist’s experimentation with aluminum-based paint. Chambers later disavowed this brief, fertile period in his painting career, but curators Mark Cheetham and Ihor Holubizky cannily juxtapose them here with his films, revealing a visual priority that stretched well beyond his representational virtuosity, as seen in his later paintings, and into the building blocks of seeing itself. This list is unranked, but if it were, this would be jockeying for top spot; at the AGO, a clear argument is made that Chambers should be important; “The Light From the Darkness” unequivocally makes plain that he is.

6. David Levine, Habit, part of the Luminato Festival

In what is surely a sign of the apocalypse — plagues of locust to follow — I’ve chosen a work from Luminato’s visual arts program as one of the year’s best. I prejudged Levine’s work, a voyeuristic, organic, perpetual-motion take on the idea of experimental theatre that nudged itself into the realm of performance art, as better on paper than it would be in person: three actors trapped in a see-through apartment, living and reliving fabricated lives through a loose script while perpetually on view, awake or asleep, in action or inaction, clothed or very much not. My mistake: Habit was an over-watchable compulsion, indulging dark curiosities as viewers followed actors down halls and into the bathroom, peeking through curtains and, in so doing, obliterating the virtual wall between performer and audience, onstage and off. I went back four times. Enough said.

7. “Micah Lexier, Things Exist,” Birch Libralato Gallery

I was starting to wonder when Lexier, a pillar of the local art scene, might take a break from collaborating, curating and generally bolstering the profile of other artists to actually have a show here himself. “Things Exist” arrived just in time this fall, reaffirming Lexier’s role not only as connective tissue for a sometimes disparate art scene here, but an artist in complete command of his craft, and a quiet, undeniable force. Assembled from humble found objects — discarded books, a box, scraps of abandoned cardboard — “Things Exist”put on display Lexier’s endless material curiosity, formal fascination and good humour all at once. Taken together, the show also resonated with a modest, quiet, undeniable beauty; it was the best the gallery has looked in a long, long time, which, given its impressive roster, is really saying something.

8. “Lindsey Seers, Extramission 6 (Black Maria),” Gallery TPW

In compulsive gallery-going, nothing quite matches the natural high of a completely captivating experience that takes you totally by surprise. I was lucky to have a couple such bursts this year (“Pest” being the other), but that’s how I felt when I landed in Lindsey Seers’ tar-paper shack, built inside Gallery TPW this spring. To make a long story short, the shack — itself a jarringly imposing installation, priming you for what was inside — housed a filmic biography of Seers, all screwy sci-fi weirdness, that charted her life from childhood muteness to her literally transforming herself first into a camera (at a talk in Toronto beforehand, she pursed her lips to demonstrate the technique, to the befuddlement of many), and then a projector. Wonderfully, engagingly odd and told documentary style — interviews with her mother and a psychiatrist form the narrative backbone — the story had a necessary deadpan delivery, but incisive clues to Seers’ true intentions surrounded it. The shack, a replica of Thomas Edison’s Black Maria, the first-ever film studio, coupled with Seers’ story to form a quietly forceful comment on perception, memory and the very nature of our image-heavy, multimedia world. Good, smart fun.

9. Jon Sasaki, Pine, Toronto Now

You may be seizing on a theme here, and you’d be right: That the AGO did more right by the hometown art scene this year than any other I can think of, and Sasaki’s installation for Toronto Now was one of its quiet emblems. I’m still not keen on Toronto artists finding a home between the coat room and the bar in the gallery’s restaurant, of all things, but showing Sasaki’s film shot on Canoe Lake, the site of the death of legendary woodsy painter Tom Thomson, opened a critique of the gallery’s long-held priorities — Thomson and the Group of Seven maintain pride of place — within its own walls. In Pine, Sasaki frames a resplendent shot of majestic Canoe Lake, and then pans up, up, up above the shimmering waves before the camera travels inland. Shrouded by pine boughs, the camera snags, shudders and drops; branches snap and the view jerks until it falls to rest on the ground. A quixotic comment on the hubristic futility of capturing nature’s force in art — both his own and Thomson’s — Pine was also hilarious, unapologetic slapstick, and an antidote to typical institutional preciousness.

10. “Abstract Expressionist New York,” Art Gallery of Ontario

Well, duh. It may have come pre-packaged from one of the world’s top museums — New York’s Museum of Modern Art — with all the requisite summer blockbuster boxes ticked (superstar names, famous works, check, check), but you’d have to be the ultimate cynic not to embrace the chance to swim in the gestural, material joy of some of the jaw-dropping works that the AGO convinced MoMA to give up for a few months this summer (remember, too, that the AGO was the only travelling venue for the show, a careful culling of works from MoMA’s definitive AbEx collection). The AGO did themselves proud by not just duplicating the show, but creating a home for it that keyed on and intensified both the shows various intimacies and occasional explosiveness. For once, a blockbuster without the “buts.” A winner.

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